Are agencies dead?

I got asked if agencies were dead.

It’s an annoying question that makes a reasonable headline.

So I gave an annoying answer.

I said in a sense they were never alive.

Every business is just an abstract concept. A registration number that humans flock around, building things, cold emailing other abstract concepts and recording the results in spreadsheets.

They acknowledged it had been an annoying question and gave me a second chance.

We tried to find the real question.

Because businesses will always need other businesses to achieve outcomes for them.

And that’s what an agency does, be it creative, marketing, recruitment or cleaning.

The question is about your business.

Is AI going to change things so much that the outcomes your agency achieves are no longer in demand, or are achieved in other ways?

So now we can establish whether you are dead. How lovely.

What makes you worth it

You’re worth it when you can reach an outcome at a better return on investment than any other way of getting there.

That return has a few moving parts.

How much effort it takes. How much skill and experience.

What it costs, and how efficiently it can be done.

How fast.

Then the outcome itself. How much impact it has. And the risk of not pulling it off.

You’re not going to win on efficiency.

All things equal, an in-house team is cheaper. AI is cheaper than both of you. So is your client’s nephew, and the guy from IT who reckons he can do it.

That wasn’t ever a way to win.

Where you actually win

You win where skill and experience are a multiplier.

There are going to be few things AI can’t do. But there are plenty where doing it well makes all the difference.

AI gets everyone to good enough. You’re for the work where good enough isn’t.

Outcomes of complexity and high quality.

And you win where the stakes are high.

High impact, which makes it high risk, because getting it wrong is expensive.

That’s when people stop only wanting capability and start wanting someone accountable too.

They could hire the people themselves. But then they carry that risk. You’re the one who’s done it before, and can be held to doing it again.

AI doesn’t take away any risk. In fact, it probably introduces more.

The risk of things that look great but turn out not to be.

Perhaps you always wanted to work in these places of high value and high impact. It’s always been my goal.

Now is the time to work out how to get there.

And hey, I’m sure there are other combinations of these factors that work if you find the right outcome. You might deliver something lower value, super efficiently, that’s still tricky enough to need your experience.

Find the situation where you’re the best return on investment.

That’s where your agency lives.